Unsaid
by aoutis
Summary: There was always one thing he wanted from Mac. It wasn't something he could say without being misunderstood.
1. Prologue

**_This is my first Newsroom story, as well as my first (semi-) M story. Feedback would be very much appreciated. I really don't know where this is going or how many chapters it's going to be. However, I DO know that I own nothing. _**

Mac had always been a good fuck. He never had any illusions that it was just with him. Like so many other areas of her life, she knew what she liked and how to get it. And the result was usually…mind-blowing.

That's what made him so fucking angry. No, not angry. He wasn't angry with her. Really, he wasn't. It's just that he knew. He knew why Brian came back. He knew what happened when Brian called her at midnight. He knew that look in her eye when he opened the door. He knew what her lips felt like and how her tongue moved…sometimes in concentric circles. He knew her breasts: that impossibly soft milky-whiteness. He knew how she tasted and how she smelled. He knew her wetness and her tightness. He knew her moans and whimpers and that deep-throated sound that didn't have a name. He knew the exact angle she arched her back. He knew how hard she made him come.

Will couldn't come anymore. At least, not alone. She had taken that from him. He couldn't jerk off without his mind drifting to her: how she felt around him, her mouth on him, her nails, the way she…then he couldn't see her without Brian. Brian inside of her. Brian pounding into her. Brian coming in her. And then he lost it. And there he was with his dick in his hand...frustrated, hurting, impotent.


	2. Chapter 1

**_This is my first Newsroom story, as well as my first (semi-) M story. Feedback would be very much appreciated. I really don't know where this is going or how many chapters it's going to be. However, I DO know that I own nothing._**

He'd never been much of a ladies' man. He liked women, sure. He dated casually. Sex came when it came, but it was never something that drove him…not until he got to know a woman, until she interested him, stimulated him.

Sex was something he wanted almost immediately with Mac.

He'd known her by reputation for years. He liked her work. He remembered watching the show she produced during the 1995 government shutdown and developing a sort of mind crush on her. Then she went overseas and dropped off of his radar. He didn't give her much thought until she came up from Washington two days after 9/11 to do some special coverage. He ran into Charlie showing her around the newsroom, telling her which staff she could borrow.

'The man of the hour,' he'd said as Will approached. 'Will McAvoy, I'd like you to meet Mackenzie McHale. She's come up from Washington to produce our 9/11 special. Will would be a good guy to interview, Mac. He really came through for us.'

'I remember. You were spectacular. I can't imagine what it took to stay on air that night.'

There was something about her eyes, the way she looked at him: admiring, intrigued, but also questioning. He wanted more of it. He wanted to ask her out then and there, but he was late for a rundown meeting and Charlie seemed pressed for time.

The next morning, she stood in the doorway to his office asking him to help her with what she called the 'in real time' segment of her special. She was talking about the importance of sentimentality without emotional manipulation and what she thought he could contribute. And he couldn't stop staring at the ink smudge just above her right eye and the tear in her pantyhose along her left calf. And he couldn't remember meeting a woman that he had been more attracted to. He realized that he was staring at her. He could read her confusion at his intensity all over her face. Just as he opened his mouth to ask her to lunch, she looked down at her watch and told him that she would see him in the rundown meeting.

Will was never great at paying attention in the rundown meeting. As the legal correspondent, very little of it pertained to him. Since the 9/11 coverage, more of the staff seemed to be looking to him for input. So, he participated as much as he could without fully checking in. But there was something about her presence that made him sit up and listen and speak. He wanted to impress her. She sure as hell impressed him. By the end of meeting (which had gone about 45 minutes over time…not that it felt like it), she'd talked Brenda, the reluctant and exhausted EP, into rearranging almost the entire broadcast.

Will watched her, gesturing passionately, creating a narrative of hope and reassurance that the post-9/11 broadcasts had been missing. He knew they needed it. He needed it. He was a grown man, but 9/11 had made him feel like the 10-year-old boy standing between his father's fists and his younger siblings. He couldn't make sense of this fucked-up situation and he didn't have an explanation for it: no words. The only thing he could do was stand there. And here she was...giving him words. Not words that would make it all better. That wasn't possible. But her words that gave him hope and peace and…he couldn't remember the exact second that he fell in love with her: that point of no return. But it happened. When he walked out of that meeting, something in him had changed.

He wanted her. He'd never wanted a woman so much in his life. He wanted to be as physically close to her as he could possibly get. He wanted to be enfolded in her. He wanted to crawl into her. He wanted his whole body to be inside of her. He didn't want to know where he ended and she began. He couldn't look at her without wishing he were lying between her legs, buried inside of her, wishing he could stay like that.

He was semi-hard for most of the day. He wanted to ask her out, take her to dinner, bring her home and fuck her like the world was going to end. No, not fuck her. That was the wrong word. No, yeah, fuck her…because he was desperate. He needed her. He needed her to feel him, pulsating. He needed to feel her heartbeat against him, around him.

The broadcast was fucking amazing. Will thought it was the best one that anyone had done. She really had something…something he'd never seen. The whole staff was blown away. They went to a bar afterward. Even Will went. He didn't usually socialize, but there was no way he was going home tonight without her.

They were just finishing their second round of drinks when he came. Brian Brenner walked up behind Mac, put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her on the neck. Will wasn't absolutely sure, but he thought he saw Mac blush when she looked down, just before she turned around, stood up and kissed him hello. She introduced him as her boyfriend and Will turned his attention to his drink.

An hour and two rounds later, Will began chatting up a woman at the bar. She'd been sitting there since Brian came and it was obvious she'd been stood up. She recognized him from the 9/11 coverage. She told him about her old college roommate that worked in one of the Towers and how she hadn't been able to reach her. She was pretty. No, she was beautiful. Will found it hard to believe that any guy in his right mind would stand her up. Then again, here he was talking to her and looking over her shoulder at Mac. Mac laughing. Mac arguing. Mac talking excitedly about something that he was sure he wanted to know. Mac being touched.

He looked away and asked the woman—Jen or Jane or Janet—if she wanted to get out of there. She did and he took her home. He'd never had a night like that. He'd never done the things that he did that night with a perfect stranger. She said that it was 9/11…they were looking for a way to feel alive. Will felt alive. What he needed was someone else to know.


	3. Chapter 2

**_This chapter is covers a lot of time. I wanted to jump forward to their relationship. I'm planning to write some chapters from Mac's POV, but I'm not sure whether they should come after more of Will's chapters or whether they should be interspersed. If you have strong feelings about what I should do, please let me know in the comments. I do not own The Newsroom. _**

He rarely saw her after those five weeks in late 2001. She'd left New York a week earlier than planned, convinced that she needed to get back to Washington to cover congressional investigations into 9/11. Will tried to help her persuade Brenda to curb coverage of the rescue and clean-up in favor of putting a more critical eye on Washington. He wanted her to stay, of course, but he also thought she was right. Decisions were being made and the American people needed to know.

By her second week in New York, she was effectively producing his 5-minute legal segment each night. They tried to provide context and analysis for the decisions being made in Washington. Between those daily segments and his contributions to her 9/11 special, they were working pretty closely together.

It wasn't anything like Will expected it to be. They argued. He didn't mean to argue with her. But she would say something and, even if he agreed, he couldn't stop himself from taking up the other side. She mocked him. She looked at him like he was crazy. He told her she was too idealistic and unreasonable. She told him that she'd never met anyone more committed to wasting their life than him. He called her at 1:37am to apologize. She reciprocated. They joked about it the next morning. They had the same sense of humor. Will loved that. He loved her playful mockery of his penchant for musical theatre and her terrible impersonations of his favorite comedians. She dislocated her right pinky trying to mimic Curly in a sketch from _I Can Hardly Wait._ He caught a cab with her to the hospital.

Then, she left. It wasn't as hard as Will thought it would be. He'd understood that it was temporary. He'd accepted her invitations to the bar every Friday night because he knew Brian would come up from DC and meet them. She invited him at least three times a week, but he only went on Fridays. He needed the reminder. So, it really wasn't that bad when she left.

They exchanged emails. Well, she emailed him notes when she thought his segments weren't quite what they should have been. Will suspected that she thought this everyday or at least every time she watched, but she only emailed once a week. He looked forward to her emails; read them over and over. Her words echoed in his head. He woke up to them, wrote his scripts with them, went to bed and dreamt about them, about her. Her sitting naked in his bed, yelling at him for not talking about the US government's refusal to ratify the new International Criminal Court. Her rolling her eyes at his reports on Slobodan Milosevic's Hague trial as she rode him, then came in spite of herself. Her telling him what to report on Operation Anaconda while he lowered his face between her legs, held her hips, and tasted her.

Will rarely responded to her emails. His segments were his response. He spoke to her. It was just better that way.

He didn't see her again until 2003, when he found himself seated with her and Brian at the Whitehouse Correspondents' dinner. It was the start of the Iraq War and Brian spent most of the evening trying to pick a fight with him about the Administration's decisions. Brian couldn't seem to decide whether he was more frustrated that Will was a Republican, who didn't think there was enough evidence of WMDs, or that he questioned the evidence of WMDs, but wouldn't say it on air. Will had been anchoring at 10pm for a little over a year. His ratings were high, especially for that time slot. He didn't think it was his place to inject his opinion.

Mac was unusually silent. She just stared at him. In the dim light of the dinner, her stare looked like a mixture of embarrassment, disappointment and compassion…for what he didn't know. She was wearing a plum dress that made it hard to breathe.

Afterward, at the ACN Ball, he asked her to dance. Will was a good dancer. He wanted to show her, but he'd had so much wine at dinner that he couldn't focus on anything but dancing. Her speech about the Fourth Estate and his responsibility to the nation was something of a blur in his memory. He did remember her heat, her intoxicating smell, the questioning look in her eyes, her smile, her kiss on his cheek, her thanking him for the dance. Two hours later, Will made brief eye contact with her as he went up to his hotel room with a blonde correspondent from Reuters.

The emails started coming every other week.

In early 2004, she and Brian moved to New York. She'd taken a job as an EP at CNN and Brian was working for Newsweek. Will heard about her. He watched her program every night. He knew people that talked to her every day. But he didn't see her until a year later, after she and Brian broke up. She was coming back to ACN.


	4. Chapter 3

**I'm sorry for taking so long to post another chapter. I've been busy with exams, a paper, a friend's wedding, etc. Thank you so much to those of you who have reviewed. It is so unbelievably encouraging to have feedback. ****This chapter starts at Northwestern and works backward to pick up where the last chapter left off. **The italicized words below are Aaron Sorkin's. I do not own them or anything else. 

_'An individual can't build a school or assemble an army or navy…'_

It was the light. He'd always hated being on stages. There were just too many lights. He had no idea why he agreed to this. Actually, come to think of it, he didn't agree to this. It was Charlie that thought it was a good idea for him to talk to students. He really needed to have them run these things by his agent.

One of the stage lights flashed at the exact same time he thought he saw something. His brain didn't register what it was, but his breath hitched.

_'Good idea or bad idea on the fire department? Or should it be a private fire department that only comes to your burning house if you pay your monthly fire bill?'_

He saw her. And he couldn't breathe. Damn it. These fucking lights. She was there. And then she wasn't. What the fuck was happening to him?

_ 'It's not.'_

_'But it can be.'_

Now he was seeing her and hearing her voice. That crisp upper-middle-class English accent. The impatient cadence that he'd tried so hard to put out of his mind.

'You can be.'

He couldn't see those words written on her notebook, but he heard them.

'You can be.'

She had appeared in his doorway. No 'hello.' No 'nice to see you after two years.' No 'just so you know, I'm working here now.' Arms crossed. No ACN badge, although he remembered they were required in those days.

'I'm sorry?'

'You can be. You told your guest on Friday that you weren't a prosecutor anymore, so he shouldn't feel the need to take the fifth as if he were being cross-examined. Then he proceeded to blow smoke up your ass about the changes in the House Ethics Rules for six minutes. I never thought I'd say this, but thank God for commercials.'

'Are we going to start having weekly meetings instead of emails now that you're working here?'

'We can. From the look of things in that newsroom and the horrendous B block on Friday, we probably should.'

'I think Tom might have a problem with that.'

'If Tom were doing his job, Charlie wouldn't have asked me to tell you what I thought.'

'Oh, so you're here because Charlie asked you?'

'No, I'm here because someone has to tell you that your guests SHOULD feel like they're being cross-examined…if you're doing your job.'

'If you're going to tell me how to do my job, can we discuss it over lunch? I don't think Tom or the staff should hear everything you have to say.'

'Fine. Shall we say noon tomorrow?'

'I'll see you then.'

She left almost as suddenly as she came. He glanced down at his watch. It couldn't have been more than one minute. She was only in his office for a minute and, yet, Will felt like his whole world had changed. He realized he was standing. He didn't remember standing up, but there he was.

They had lunch that Tuesday and every Tuesday after that.

It took Will six weeks to ask her out. Not because he didn't think about it. He thought about it everyday. The words were on the tip of his tongue for an hour and a half every Tuesday. But then he would meet her eyes. And suddenly she seemed so fragile. He'd never thought of her as fragile. There was nothing fragile about her voice: that alternating rhythm of amusement, exasperation and sarcasm. There was absolutely nothing fragile about her body: lithe, delicate, elegant… But her eyes.

'Would you like to have dinner with me?'

The words surprised him. He hadn't planned on asking. He planned on giving her time. She looked up from her notes. Fear. He wasn't expecting that. Surprise. Maybe discomfort. But he saw fear.

'Will…'

'We could meet for dinner next Sunday instead of lunch on Tuesday. I think I may be taking up too many of your lunches.' Will backtracked. He didn't normally backtrack. He didn't normally interrupt.

'Do you mean that I'm taking up too many of your lunches?'

'No. Look, this isn't your job. You're doing me a favor. And I don't want it to interfere with your week.'

'It's not a problem. Charlie's given me the go-ahead. And I like telling you what I think.' She smiled. It was a weak smile. Almost pained. But Will smiled back. And they carried on.

They had dinner five weeks later. She asked him. She'd just handed him a highlighted copy of the Bush commission's findings on US Intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq War. He was reading through her notes while she looked at the menu.

'Would you still like to have dinner?'

His eyes stopped on the words 'weapons capabilities.' He looked up. He didn't know whether he was more surprised at the question or the look in her eyes. Vulnerable. He opened his mouth. It took a few seconds to form the words.

'Yeah. Would Sunday be good for you?' He didn't want to be presumptuous.

'Actually, I was thinking about Saturday night.'

Date night. So, it was a date. Right?

'Can I pick you up at 7?'

'I can meet you.' She stopped. She must have seen the uncertain look in his eyes. 'Actually, if you wouldn't mind picking me up. 7 is good.'

'Yeah. No, I wouldn't mind. Okay, 7 it is.'

'Have you made it to page 4? You should start the B block tomorrow with the third paragraph.'

She looked back down at her menu. And that was it.


End file.
